Tom Hanks wears a Casio G-Shock

In April 2009, Somali pirates boarded the MV Maersk Alabama off the Horn of Africa and seized it, the first American cargo ship taken by pirates in roughly two hundred years. Captain Richard Phillips offered himself as a hostage to get the men off his vessel, and four days later Navy SEAL snipers ended the standoff from the fantail of a destroyer. Paul Greengrass turned the episode into Captain Phillips in 2013, shooting it in the same handheld, documentary-realist mode he had used on United 93, so that even the quiet moments feel like footage rather than staging. Billy Ray wrote the screenplay from Phillips's own 2010 memoir, A Captain's Duty. Tom Hanks plays the captain, and opposite him is Barkhad Abdi, a first-time actor and former Minneapolis limo driver cast as the pirate leader Abduwali Muse, a performance that earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

The watch turns up at the tensest point on the ship. Phillips is flat on the diamond-plate deck, a signal flare gun gripped in both hands, a young crewman pinned against a doorway behind him, and as his arm presses to the steel floor the camera catches what he is wearing. It is a black resin Casio G-Shock, the digital sport watch on a matching resin strap, round case with the protruding bumper bezel that the line is known for. The face is turned down toward the deck in the shot, so you can read the silhouette but not the model number. That ambiguity is honest: the G-Shock is unmistakably there and unmistakably his, even if the precise reference stays just out of view.

What is worth noticing is how right the choice feels. A merchant-marine captain on a working freighter is not a man who wears jewelry to sea. He wears something shock resistant and water resistant that he never has to think about, which is exactly what Casio built the G-Shock to be when it introduced the line in the early 1980s. The watch reads as costume in the truest sense, a prop that tells you who the man is before he says a word. And there is a small joke buried in the framing. The G-Shock is most legible precisely when Phillips is face-down on a steel deck during an armed hijacking, earning its shock-resistant billing in a literal hostage crisis.

The film's most discussed moment comes later and has nothing to do with the watch. After the SEALs free him, a Navy corpsman, a real one rather than an actor, treats Phillips in the medical bay while he comes apart from the shock of it. Hanks worked the scene largely without scripted lines and simply reacted, and it is widely cited as one of the finest things he has ever done on screen.